Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, September 16, 2013

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

AS CHILDREN HEAR IT2

A couple of
weeks ago [look up “Child’s Eye View” on
the index at right], I told the tale of misreading a piece of music and a
comic film when I was a tot, and imagining both of them to be scary.

Those were personal reactions
corrected by an adult understanding of the codes in which the music was
composed and the film made. Encountering both music and film decades later, I
saw them for the harmless things they were, but realized that my understanding
was not innate. It was taught by experience.

Now for a slight variation on the
same theme.

As a parent I have, over the
years, read many books to my growing children. As the youngest of them is now
into teenager-hood, they are all much too old to be read to anymore; but I’m
sure the growing tribe of grandchildren will one day require my services.

One of the things I often found
when reading to children was how their reactions to books were very different
from the ones an adult might have expected.

I read to my children, complete
and unabridged, Charles Dickens’ Oliver
Twist. When I got to the death of Nancy, bludgeoned by the Cockney thug
Bill Sikes, I gave it full dramatic force, playing up the brutality and the
horror and the pathos in my yelping and growling and sobbing and the piteous
cries for mercy of Nancy.

I expected my children to quiver
with horror or at the very least be shocked.

But they didn’t turn a hair. It
was just another episode in the story to them.

But a few chapters later, when
Bill Sikes’ dog met its death, they were genuinely shocked and let out gasps of
horror. Animals being mistreated perhaps seemed more vivid to them than the
death of a woman.

Also they surprised me by liking
the Rose Maylie bits of the novel, where the mistreated Oliver briefly finds
safe haven in the country. These are episodes that are always cut out of film
and television adaptations of Oliver
Twist because they don’t advance the plot much; and therefore they tend not
to be well-remembered. But I think my children felt comfy and cosy with them.
Little waif being looked after by substitute mother is a motif to which
children respond well.

As another example of my children
not responding to a reading as I hoped they would – I read Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Treasure Island to them,
doing my best Long John Silver “Aaarrrr
Jim lad!” theatricals. It worked up to a point. At least they followed the
story, were suitably shocked by the plans of mutiny which Jim overhears when he
wakes in an apple barrel (think of the logistics of this, by the way – it’s not
RLS’s most credible moment), liked crazy Ben Gunn with his requests for cheese
and were intrigued by Jim’s encounter with seals and voyage in the coracle.

But as the battles increased
between mutinying pirates and Captain Smollett’s loyal followers, and as the
body count rose, my children began to resist the story and actually rebel
against it. When I read Treasure Island
as a kid, the death of Israel Hands was a sublime moment (“One more step, Mr Hands, and I’ll blow your brains out!”). For my children it was just one more murder
and they began to say, “This story is violent and horrible”.

As an adult, I’m probably being
very inconsistent in expecting my children to be appalled by murder in one
novel (Oliver Twist) and to enjoy it
as part of a rollicking tale in another (Treasure
Island). But their reaction was just as inconsistent as my own.

There may be another factor at
work here. In all sorts of ways, my children were subjected to values and
social pressures that didn’t exist in quite the same way when I was their age.

I think Captain Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest – the one
about Cavalier children hiding out from Roundheads – is still a charming pastoral
and wonderful piece of wish-fulfilment for younger adolescents who want to
dream of running their own house without grown-ups. But my eldest daughter got
very angry with it when I read it to her and her elder brother.

The problem is that all the
interesting stuff in the story happens to the two boys, Edward and Humphrey,
who learn to be foresters, hunt animals, evade their enemies and so forth. The
two girls, Alice and Edith, simply stay at home in the forest cottage and keep
house. This made my daughter furious. Girls should be able to do anything,
obviously. No gender stereotyping and boring housekeeping please. She folded
her arms, glowered and stamped her foot when I got to the end of The Children of the New Forest. She was
much more comfortable with the assertive Nancy, adventurous captain of the
Amazons, in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and
Amazons series.

So feminism and anti-violence
teaching have some impact on kids. And perhaps reasoned nature and wildlife
documentaries do too. When I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to my kids, one of my sons protested at the author’s
description of nesting dinosaurs as if it was something filthy and disgusting.
“But they’re only animals”, he said, realizing that Sir Arthur was trying to
manipulate the readers’ response with inappropriately chosen adjectives.

I heard somebody once claim that
children have very acute “bullshit detectors”. I don’t think this is always
true. Children are as gullible as most adults when it comes to succumbing to
publicity and fads. But where books are concerned their reactions can be
surprising and unexpected; and they can sometimes see through an author’s
artifice, even if they don’t always understand the codes that govern genres.